Chai Tea Soap!

I first tried chai tea (the actual beverage) when I was about 16 years old, in a now-long-gone coffeehouse on Bardstown Road in Louisville, KY (Twice Told Coffeehouse, guys - *tear*). They even offered a chai shake that was to die for. When I started selling soap, nailing a chai tea scent for soap became a huge priority. Spicy, sweet and warm - who wouldn't be thrilled with that combination?

Chai Tea Soap. A bit spicy, but very much like the real thing!

I went through several, ahem, "drafts" of this soap. I knew I wanted the color split, a sprinkle of nutmeg on top, and soap curls on one side. The color split, believe it or not, is the toughest thing to pull off! Vanilla and vanilla-based items tend to make soap turn brown. I found that I got the most authentic chai tea scent when I used (of course) real chai tea extract (which I make myself from bags of certified organic chai tea). The extract is oil-based and takes several months to make; I tend to have several mason jars of it going at any given time!

Infusing!

When I make this soap, I measure out my butters and oils with a discount in the olive oil. The entire batch is scented with a blend of mace, clove, cinnamon, and ginger essential oils (all at skin-safe levels according to IFRA guidelines for soap). I then carefully split my batch by weight and add in the discounted olive oil to each pot: regular olive oil goes into the soap batter that's intended to go white, and vanilla oleoresin and chai tea extract (in olive oil) goes into my "brown" pot. Vanilla naturally turns soap brown due to its vanillin content, which works perfectly for the design of this soap! 

So where's the math? Well, for every batch I make, I have to carefully calculate the amount of lye that I use in order to turn all of my butters and oils into soap. In fact, I actually discount my lye amount (as most soapers do) in order to have a % of free/unsaponified oils and butters in my soap, which makes it extra moisturizing! I have a regular recipe that I use for most of my soaps (the ones with the super high shea butter content) and I tend to follow that base recipe with variations on scent and color. For this particular soap, it's less straightforward as I have to account for extra oils with my extract. So it's back to the calculator!

Curls, the dregs of my last infusion, and powdered nutmeg for the top!

In the mold, mission accomplished!

The result, thankfully, is very much worth the effort! Chai Tea is a popular bar with quite the following - great for folks who can't decide which bar to start off with!

Available here: Chai Tea Soap

Jennifer

The Day I Found Soapmaking

On its surface, making soap is a really weird sort of thing to decide to start doing. I certainly wasn't putting it down on my "what I want to be when I grow up" worksheets when I was in school. I have actually changed professions quite a bit in my time (I've been a newspaper reporter, worked in human resources, lifeguarding and swim instructor through high school and college - the list goes on!). 

Audrey and her little sister Daphne, April 2013.

In 2008, my husband and I welcomed our first child into our family: Audrey! One day, after giving my new little baby a bath, I noticed that she was developing flaky, dry patches on her skin. I had had similar patches on my legs for most of my adult life. My husband, a family practice doctor, had said that there wasn't much to be done about it beyond the prescription creams I'd tried up to that point. It's funny how you'll let things like that go about yourself but when it happens to your kids, you MUST fix it immediately!

It was around this time that I dug a little deeper into the products I was using on my baby's skin that an (ahem) popular baby wash manufacturer - the very one we'd been using - disclosed that they did in fact put formaldehyde in their products. How was this possible? This came from a formaldehyde-releasing preservative (Quaternium-15) used in all of their products. 

At this point in time, my family and I lived in Indianapolis, where we had stores like Whole Foods and Trader Joe's to shop in. A new Kroger has sprung up and offered an expanded selection of their "Nature's Market" section. This was in the early days of our crunchy/granola revolution (where as a family, we prioritized certified organic foods, breastfeeding, making our own household cleaners, and the like). You know where this is heading: along the way, I stumbled across lye-based soaps. A cursory search found many folks were making soaps this way; my interest was immediately piqued.

My very first bar of soap: Lavender with Oatmeal and Honey

It took me several months of obsessive research, reading, video watching, and poring over www.millersoap.com before I made my first soap. That soap was made using olive oil, coconut oil, palm oil (which we no longer use), lye, water, colloidal oatmeal, honey (which darkened the soap), and lavender essential oil. I still have a bar of this soap! While I can't truly compare this soap to the ones I make now in quality (it's quite laughable really), at the time we LOVED and used up nearly every bar of this soap. It immediately replaced all of our soap; even my husband (who really just wants to be clean - who cares about the soap!) refused to use anything else. Audrey's little dry spots vanished, and along the way, my legs stopped having their flaky, dry patches. 

We were completely converted. This is why so often, you'll hear me say that handmade soap - ANY handmade soap - is going to be better than 99% of anything else you can buy. It took me many more years before I started to sell my soap, time that I am grateful that I spent because it allowed me to tweak and perfect my final recipes before selling, as well as the experience I gained in what happens when a soap batch goes wrong, what my soap looks like one (or five!) years out, how my scents age, and to see what my colorants will do (which is especially important when using plant-based colorants; not all of them perform equally!).

Logo!

But what's with the name, you ask? I didn't want to insert my kids, who are my ultimate inspirations, into my business model. Orchard Hill is my happy place. It's a grove of trees in bloom, bees buzzing, wind swishing through the leaves, a hammock strung between branches, and complete serenity. I actually think about it when I meditate and when I'm calming down at the end of the day, ready to go to sleep. It's the feeling I want someone to experience whenever they use something I make. I think of it before everything I make!

Soapy soaps!

Freshly-cut bars of Mentha Veridis (Eucalyptus + Mint with Rosemary), waiting to cure!

Since we have some new fans, I thought I'd go a little into what a standard OHTC bar of soap is like. The only exception to all the attributes I'm about to mention is our Oatmeal, Milk and Honey bar, which we try to keep as simple as possible for folks who just want soap with few ingredients to lessen the possibility of irritation.

First of all, when it comes to soap, you can rarely go wrong with choosing a soap made the old-fashioned way (with lye and oils) over what we call a "syndet" (synthetic detergent) based bar. There are a myriad of reasons, from better conditioning properties, fewer harsh chemicals, fewer toxins, and you have the manufacturer - me! - to talk to about any particularities when it comes to soap. So anytime I hear someone loves to use handcrafted soap, regardless of whether it comes from me or not, I know that they're already a convert to just how amazing and different handcrafted soap is!

Source: The Facebook page for Wax and Soapy Water

It's amazing how much the handcrafted soap movement has grown since I first started making soap. And just like the people making it, each soap is different and each soap formula is unique. At OHTC, our soaps all contain certified organic coconut milk for scrumptiously decadent lather, over 20% fresh shea butter (so your skin doesn't immediately get that awful tight feeling when you step out of the shower; oh I hate that!), pure cosmetic grade clays that are mined from the earth (and fully tested for impurities), and scented with essential oils, oleoresins, extracts, teas, botanicals, and herbs and spices you'd find in the grocery store. We only use food grade oils and butters in our soaps, and we have chosen to only use fats that have a long shelf life (like extra virgin olive oil and coconut) so you won't find your bar of soap going rancid before its time. These aren't Crisco oil bars. We are also palm oil free and choose not to use rendered fats from animals (this isn't to say that these don't make great bars of soap, because they certainly can! Our formula just went another way.). Each bar is individualized not only in scent, but also with its own blend of botanicals, clays, and design. 

OHTC's Tea Tree Mint. How many colors can you find?
They're all from clays, zinc oxide, cocoa powder, nettle leaves, and activated charcoal!

So how can you compare handcrafted soaps to each other? You can always read labels, if they're made available (soap doesn't strictly have to list ingredients, and many soapers use this as an opportunity to use terms like "natural fats" or "vegetable oil" to describe their soapmaking oils). But in reality, it's an impossible mission. We all have different skin needs and different opinions about skin care. Thank goodness there's a growing number of soapmakers to take care of all of us!